Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (5 page)

Far from causing him a professional problem, these adventures helped seal Lee’s reputation as one of the most prominent and successful early public relations practitioners—a reputation that he lost rather abruptly in 1933 when he went to work for the German Dye Trust, trying to promote relations between the United States and Nazi Germany and leaving a stain that still blots his name.

Lee’s big competitor for the title “father of public relations” is Edward Bernays, an Austrian immigrant to the United States and Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Bernays is the person who coined the term “engineering consent.” In his 1928 book
The Business of
Propaganda,
Bernays put into words something that every demagogue in history probably knew instinctively. He wrote, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”

It would be foolish to take issue with this or even to insist that it is necessarily evil in its conception or intent. As anyone who has ever been involved in a public relations or political campaign knows, humans are not coldly rational in their decision making or uniformly predictable in their responses. They are generally busy, a little harried, and appropriately obsessed with their own affairs. In most cases it’s hard to get their attention at all, and when you do, people often respond emotionally or on the strength of biases that may be a complete mystery to an advertiser, an advocate, or a politician hoping to engage in a straight conversation. Effective public relations requires a degree of subtlety. You have to make the effort to understand why people think the way they do, and you have to find a way to communicate in a fashion that will enable them to understand you.

Bernays also recognized both the benefits and dangers of developing and using such skills. Writing in his other 1928 book,
Propaganda,
he said that a public relations counsel (another term he appears to have coined) “must never accept a retainer or assume a position which puts his duty to the groups he represents above his duty to society.”

Bernays then built a great career faithfully exercising his duty to his clients in a way that often seemed to disadvantage society. Some of this was relatively harmless; for example, he organized the first known political pancake breakfast (for Calvin Coolidge). He also organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in Manhattan in 1929. In what was presented as a demonstration for women’s equality, Bernays assembled a crowd of young women who marched in that year’s Easter parade smoking Lucky Strikes, asserting their right to smoke in public. This stirring performance was paid for by a relatively small investment from the American Tobacco Company, which got the benefit when women felt “liberated” enough to start smoking in public.

If you consider how little was known at the time about the dangers of smoking, you might be able to pass this off as a cute and clever campaign. (Bernays himself said before his death in 1995 that he would never have organized the event if he had known that smoking was to become one of the principal health threats of the century.) Yet even today, the “torches” parade is used in public relations courses across the country as an example of how you can earn free media attention and shift the public view of an issue in an indirect way. In the way people enjoy being fooled by a good magician, they seem willing to forgive Bernays for having tricked them with a public relations event that at the time he would have argued was harmless.

Less forgivable was Bernays’s participation in the campaign (and ultimate CIA coup) to oust the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 , an incident that put the interests of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) ahead of all others. Bernays also noted in his own autobiography that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels praised another of Bernays’s books,
Crystalizing Public Opinion,
as having been helpful in crafting the campaign against German Jews.

It would not be fair or accurate to draw some kind of Nazi propagandist thread from Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays through a whole century of public relations abuses and tie all of that to the campaign to confuse people about climate change. But it might be worth contemplating the slippery slope that faces people in public relations who forget their duty to society—the Public Relations Society of America’s caution to practice “professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.”

In an adversarial world full of lawyers, where you get used to hearing one person on one side of an issue and one on the other, a danger exists that public relations people will begin to think of themselves not as communicators with a responsibility to their audience but only as advocates. In court (and before you conclude that I am lawyer-bashing, I learned all this in law school myself), there is a convention that every accused person deserves the best possible defense, and it is the lawyer’s duty to mount that defense to the best of his or her ability. We have even grown to accept the idea that it’s acceptable to construct a case that is entirely—almost deceptively—one-sided, knowing that the lawyer on the other side will bring equal vigor to the case. This approach appears to have carried over to public relations and to the court of public opinion. Some public relations people act as though it is their duty to mount the most compelling— or most devastating—case possible on behalf of their client, leaving it to the opposition to mount a counter argument, and allowing the public to sort it out.

The problem is this: in court, there are rules of evidence (you have to tell the truth) and a judge who has the expertise and is given the resources to make an intelligent decision about what is being presented. But there are no such rules in the public conversation. There are only tactics, strategies, and spin.

Although it is not always successful in doing so, the court also endeavors to level the playing field when one party is rich and powerful and another is pressed for resources. In the court of public opinion, however, there is no such corrective. Rich individuals, large corporations, and industry associations can afford to muster a devastating campaign, against which environmentalists or conscientious scientists must always strain to respond.

At the end of the day, it comes back to the rules of ethical practice. As Edward Bernays might have said, it’s okay to put lipstick on a vice president (or a vice-presidential candidate), but you should always call a pit bull a pit bull. That’s not what’s been happening in the climate change conversation. A public policy dialogue that should have been driven by science has instead been disrupted by public relations—and if you look closely, it seems to be the kind of public relations that Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays practiced on their worst days, not the kind they recommended on their best.

[
four
]
THE AGE OF ASTROTURFING
In which industry steals credibility from the people

I
t was a conspiracy!

There’s something histrionic about that charge. The very idea of a cabal of rich and powerful people conspiring to fool the public about a fundamental point of science strains credulity and is offensive in its own right. Yet if you read on, you will see that there are conspiracies aplenty, documented and undeniable.

The first was organized by the Western Fuels Association, which as of April 2009 defined itself on
www.westernfuels.org
as “a not-for-profit cooperative that supplies coal and transportation services to consumer-owned electric utilities throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest regions.” The magic word in that description is “coal,” the most plentiful conventional energy source in the world and the number-one fuel for electric utilities in the United States, which has the second-largest known deposit of coal in the world, only slightly behind Australia. The problem is that coal is also the worst fossil fuel when it comes to generating carbon dioxide, and those coal-fired electrical generators are already the largest carbon dioxide point source in the country.

In 1991 Western Fuels joined with the National Coal Association and the Edison Electric Institute to create the Information Council on the Environment (ICE). This was a not-very-arm’s-length organization that would use its original US$500,000 budget “to reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)” and “supply alternative facts to support the suggestion that global warming will be good.”
¹

ICE went into small U.S. markets that were heavily dependent on coal-fired electricity and, with advance planning from the D.C. public relations firm Bracy Williams and Company, tested a series of messages, including:

• “Some say the Earth is warming. Some also said the Earth was flat.”

• “Who told you the Earth was warming . . . Chicken Little?”

• “How much are you willing to pay to solve a problem that may not exist?”

It actually wasn’t getting warmer in Minneapolis, and presumably the messaging went down well, especially on cold winter days, because ICE rolled out a campaign that included newspaper and radio advertising. ICE also learned that audiences didn’t take coal or electrical company officials very seriously when it came to arguing environmental issues, but that they were inclined to listen to “technical experts.” So ICE mobilized a group of scientists who in many instances were not climate change experts, but who would nevertheless make themselves available for newspaper and broadcast interviews and sign opinion page articles that could be distributed to local papers.

Parallel to the ICE operation, the Western Fuels Association also launched another “educational” entity called the Greening Earth Society, which produced a video called
The Greening
of Planet Earth,
a thirty-minute love note to carbon dioxide that is still available for viewing on YouTube. This became the first public appearance of a group of scientific experts made up of people like Sherwood Idso—people who have since become famous for their willingness to argue climate science on behalf of the fossil fuel lobby. In the video they argue that Earth’s plants are starving for carbon dioxide and that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in a more fertile world. Ignoring the implications of climate change, especially the threat of lasting droughts that could turn much of the equatorial zone into a desert,
The Greening of Planet Earth
showed a time-lapse animation in which carbon dioxide-driven vegetation colonizes virtually every part of the Earth’s surface—even closing in happily over the Sahara. The message was clear: climate change—if it’s happening—is a good thing.

The Western Fuels Association offered the video online in return for a small, tax-deductible donation to the Greening Earth Society, but it delivered hundreds of copies for free to public and university libraries across the country. As Naomi Oreskes reports in her fabulous podcast at smartenergyshow .com, “You CAN Argue with the Facts,” the overworked librarians at the University of Oregon took this gift at face value, filing it with the description that the Western Fuels Association had provided: “An enlightening documentary that examines one of the most misunderstood environmental phenomena of the 1980s.” Imagine the potential confusion to be suffered by a first-year student who has been reading legitimate science about global warming and checks this video out of his university library, in all probability becoming the first person at the institution to actually watch it. On one hand, the student would have learned in class that climate change was a gathering threat. On the other, the university was inadvertently endorsing a contrary argument that global warming would be a boon to humanity.

The Western Fuels Association put ICE on ice after one of its strategy documents was leaked to the newspapers, sparking a raft of embarrassing stories in the
Energy Daily,
the
National Journal,
the
Arizona Republic,
and the
New York Times.
But a pattern was beginning to take hold. Corporations and industry associations were using their considerable financial resources to influence the public conversation. They were using advertising slogans and messages that they had tested for effectiveness but not for accuracy. They were hiring scientists who were prepared to say in public things that they could not get printed in the peer-reviewed scientific press. And they were taking advantage of mainstream journalists’ willingness—even eagerness—to feature contrarian and controversial science stories, regardless of whether the controversy was actually occurring in reputable scientific publications.

The next example of a transparent effort to manipulate public opinion on a range of issues, including climate change, started out as a project of the tobacco giant Philip Morris. Big Tobacco had been playing this game since the days of Bernays, at first trying to surround cigarettes with a patina of glamor and then wrapping the death sticks in a cocoon of doubt. It began with the founding of the Tobacco Institute in the 1950s and specifically with the creation of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, later the Council for Tobacco Research. The Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research were both tireless in funding and promoting any research that would cast doubt on the health effects of smoking. There is a great scene in the 2005 movie
Thank You for Smoking
in which the main character, Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart), talks admiringly about a cigarette industry scientist who had done research on tobacco for thirty years without finding a link to cancer. About which Naylor says, sardonically, “The man’s a genius.”

From the emergence of the tobacco lobby in the 1950s until the tobacco companies started losing huge health-related lawsuits in the 1990s, the tobacco industry’s message was admirable for its consistency: the link to cancer (and, later, the cancer link to secondhand smoke) was not “proven.” Tobacco defenders said the alleged link was based on epidemiological studies that established a correlation but couldn’t prove cause and effect beyond a reasonable doubt. They also made arguments that seemed calculated to distract people from the actual issue. They said that lots of things caused cancer, so it was unreasonable to try to pin all lung cancer deaths on tobacco or to pick on cigarettes and not deal with all the other causes at the same time. And they criticized as zealots anyone who tried to educate or legislate against tobacco use, saying that the health advocates, government bureaucrats, or responsible politicians were creating a nanny state that would interfere with people’s rights.